


Laws of Variation

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 04:17:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1968705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Art struggles to deal with his failure to notice he had been working alongside an impostor, but comes to terms with it by telling himself that by helping the other clones he is helping Beth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Laws of Variation

How had he managed to go for so long without noticing anything at all? Not just those last few weeks that the woman he thought was his partner was not Beth Childs at all, but Sarah Manning. Art wondered how he could have worked with Beth for as long as he did and not realised that she was so unhappy that she was contemplating killing herself. If he had suspected, would Beth still be here today? Would she ever have opened up to him? Or would she have blown him off, called him dipshit like she always did and changed the subject in the hope he’d let it drop?

Art had suspected that there was something that wasn’t right between Beth and Paul. They’d gone out for Art’s birthday the year before and he could tell that Paul didn’t seem to feel the same way about Beth as she did about him. He’d even gone so far as to ask Angie DeAngelis if she’d noticed as well, but DeAngelis had just brushed it off, saying it was nothing to do with them and implying that Art shouldn’t even be noticing that. Art had let it drop in front of DeAngelis, but had privately asked Beth later if things were okay, telling her she didn’t have to stay with Paul. Beth had brushed it off, telling him everything was fine and not to be such a dipshit. Not long after that, the whole Maggie Chen thing had happened, of course, so Art had never brought that up with Beth again. When Sarah had then said that she had the money so that she could leave Paul, he’d believed it because he wanted to believe it, both because he’d known for a while that Paul wasn’t making Beth happy and because he didn’t want to believe that Beth would skip town to escape her hearing.

The not calling him dipshit thing? That could have easily be explained away by the fact that with the Maggie thing on her mind, she was distracted by that and bantering with Art wasn’t on her mind. And he wasn’t likely to notice the missing scar anyway, since it was usually covered up by her clothes. (Although Beth had told him the story behind the scar, so if he had had reason to look, he should have noticed. He would have noticed. He had to tell himself that, because he still couldn’t get his head around the alternative: the woman he had been working alongside for weeks was an impostor, and he had had no clue.) What really should have clued him in was the day Sarah hadn’t known how to use Beth’s gun. If it hadn’t been for Beth shooting Maggie, Art would probably have been quicker to suspect. He’d asked himself countless times afterwards why he hadn’t suspected anything from that anyway. But even if he had, he’d never have thought of clones. That sounded something like a crap movie shown on weekends, not a case he’d ever find himself investigating. And since she seemed to have mastered it the next time he saw her with a gun, again he thought no more of it.

It was only when he’d seen the subway footage that he finally realised that that was the real Beth Childs he was looking at. He’d let Beth down when she needed him, and there was no way he could make it up to her now. But he could do what he could to help Sarah Manning, and Alison and Cosima and Helena, and hell, any other clone who might turn up. In a way, helping them made him feel like he was doing something to make it up to Beth after all.


End file.
